ECO-SYSTEMS OF NORTHERN INDIA, THE COMMONS AND THE LAW     

Roots of an Alternate Approach to Poverty Alleviation  

Minoti Chakravarty-Kaul

Founder

RAAH SHAMILAT & RAHAT

Foundation for Common Lands in India  
 

THE CONTEXT 

Historical precedent and Institutional Analysis of Eco-systems:

     Since the last part of the nineteenth century and in the early 1940s in British India it was just dawning among revenue and judicial officers, but not fully comprehended that common property resources and the seemingly ‘wastelands’ or open access common grasslands were central to eco-system services that communities of both agricultural and pastoral production provided for each other. Given a particular level of technology, infra-structure of market and political governance - these eco-systems were recognizeably self-organised and self-governed to minimize risk and uncertainty not to maximize production in situations of both dynamic climate variability and political uncertainty. Thus it is that in northern India, which was the entire land mass of the doabs from the Indus to the Ganga, there were not just delineated by natural resource circumstances but access to them were ‘guided’ by customs-in-common of a tenurial system of ‘joint revenue responsibility’ which then got recorded as ‘rights’ in the village administration paper or wajib-ul-arz of forest and village settlements and for the district a riwaj-i-am.

        These eco-systems ranged over long distances being defined not just by bio-physical conditions of precipitation, vegetation, rivers and altitude but were sustained by the social-cultural relationships of communities which inhabited these tracts and adjusted with others who were non-residents. Therefore concerns of livelihood had to include both the sedentary and nomadic or transhumant aspects of natural-resource needs in the residential area of villages and townships like Lahore and Delhi, in open access wastelands of the plains and in the forests of the Siwaliks and streatching out in both directions of the Hindu Kush in the west and the Himalayas in the east.

       Such systems existed right across Europe too, in early centuries if the first millennia before the fracture of nation states occurred but continued to do so in England and Scotland into the nineteenth century. Legal historians like Erwin Nasse from Bonn outlined the importance of the institutions of village communities in England and Henry Sumner Maine carried this forward to a comparison of institutions of Europe and India. Finally it was Baden Powell who was to examine the whole concept of the wastelands and agrarian systems in south India, north Kanara to be precise. In the twentieth century it was R.P. Whyte and A.M. Stow who were to identify fallows in north India as basic to eco-systems while a the seminal work of Ester Boserup clinched the issue for Africa.

However it was already too late and economic-historians do not determine policy.  

    Twentieth century brought changes in tenure mostly determined by political means altering the legal standing of those who had access to the commons. A well-known historical example of course is the enclosure of common lands by means of private legislation in England which presumed that there was no village community and that the commons belonged to feudal manors in the centuries prior to the nineteenth. Such  dis-enfranchisement of the rural population from the effective governance of rural resources was recognized by Malthus, (unfortunate though it was that his demographic theory caught more attention) and the consequent danger of under-consumption due to pauperization, a century before the Great Depression! One never knows how neo-classical economics would have developed if Malthus rather than Ricardo were to lead the way. However John Stuart Mill did try to counter the situation by suggesting tenurial reforms to give back the commons to the dispossessed. and accordingly an Association was formed in London in 1871 with no less a person than as its first President.  

Contemporary changes in eco-systems and ‘eco-refugees’:

      It was almost it was in keeping with this tradition that after the Second World War various programs of land tenure reform became the economic and social counterpart of political movements for freedom from colonial rule in Asia and Africa. But such historic expectation unfortunately generated a field day for political games; not all indigenous communities, interests groups or political parties were equally schooled in terms of what was involved in tenurial reforms.  

      Agrarian reform has often been a double-edged strike on common property. Collectives organized around territorial commons based on customary rights were often perceived as threats to administrative spatial boundaries within the emerging nations.  Thus it was often ideology and politics that provided the rhetoric for tenurial reforms while it was the politicking during institutional design and implementation which prevented the realization of the intended goals of poverty alleviation, equity and social justice.

      A major question that arises is whether legislative development or court actions can be more appropriate tools for tenurial reforms than institutional design by politics?  In most countries in South Asia and Africa, ecological conditions vary so greatly from region to region, that a centralized and uniform statutory land tenure reforms tend to produce unintended consequences right from the outset. Very often the poorest segments of the rural communities are directly hit because those aspects of rights to common property resources which complemented private individual property rights were either ignored or annihilated, even in so-called socialist economies.     

A ray of hope?

      The Gitksan and Wet’su’Weten tribes of British Columbia initiated history in Canada in 1998 by what is known as the Delgamukw case when they struggled to get recognition for their perceptions of customary usages even though NOT recorded, by the judiciary in federal Canada. This could well re-instate first principles of historical jurisprudence so eminently established by Sir Henry Sumner Maine in the nineteenth century, and in the process revive faith in local self-governance.

         The Delgamukw case sets a path-breaking precedent, opening the window to the possibility of centralised governments avoiding solutions based on the market.  Over the last two centuries, “enclosing the commons” in both renewable and non-renewable resources and creating private property have not necessarily been efficient in scale economy. Rather, such privatisation through the market or bureaucratic execution of natural resource policy is an expensive substitute as against self-governance by pastoral people the world over. It has been the means of creating environmental refugees who are constantly under threat of being marginalised through erosion of customary rights in the commons, which in turn endanger the political stability of countries like oil-rich Africa and the middle-east.

Biographical Sketch

Dr. Minoti Chakravarty-Kaul was born in Nagpur, India.  She has a PhD in Economics (Delhi School of Economics, 1991), an MA in Economics (Delhi School of Economics, 1961), and a BA Honours in Economics (Miranda House, Delhi University, 1959). 

      She worked for 40 years 1961-2002 as a lecturer first and then a Senior Reader in Economics in Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi.  She has held a number of fellowships, including: Visiting Fellowships at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University (1999-2000) and Chair for International Economic Development (2002-2003); Shastri Indo-Canadian Senior Fellowship at the University of British Columbia (1993 and 1998); the S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Post-doctoral Fellowship (1993-1995); and Ford Foundation Fellowship at Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (1990-1992).  She is the author of Common Lands and Customary Law, Institutional Change in Northern India in the past two centuries (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996) and a variety of conference and journal articles, including: "Dam a river, why Damn a People?", Alp Jan, Vol.II, No.2, pp.28-37, Jan-March, 2002; and "Market Success or Community Failure?  Common Property Resources in Colonial North India and a Case Illustration from a Cluster", Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XXXVI, No.3, pp.355-87, August, 1999. Her current research interests include the historical development of the commons in Delhi and Eco-systems of the Himalayas, the northern plains and the Hindu Kush and how this history feeds into contemporary events for the peoples of those areas.